(first posted 1/8/2012) In the very early twentieth century a submarine was a surface craft that could be submerged. If it had to transit oceans to join a fray it was done on the deck of another ship (therefore, they called them boats). Sixty years later they were able to transit oceans submerged at speeds approaching President Nixon’s speed limit (excess of 40 knots). The speed was mostly developed between 1945 and 1953.

What sort of innovations were needed to make this change? That’s easy you say. Nuclear Power. Nope. Nuclear power allowed them to stay out longer but I am talking about the diesel electric submarines that we discussed in an earlier article.

Hint: It’s the same thinking that took us from the Stanley Steamer breaking through the 100mph mark to the current land speed record. It didn’t hurt that we stole a bunch from the Germans.

Hull configuration for Gato class

The Gato was the first fleet boat. It is the sub class that did the most to win WW2. It was called a fleet boat because it was designed to operate with and keep up with the fleet. It was to be a scout for battleships. The job was to find the enemy, report on the speed and composition of enemy forces, and whittle away at the opposition. Then they were to operate in support of the battleships during the massive gun battles that were to follow. This strategy was developed over the two decades following WW1. Something happened on 07 Dec 1941 that rendered this strategy obsolete.

On 08 December we were essentially left with no battleships to support. Lucky us, however, the same traits that allowed subs to support battleship groups were the traits that allowed us to roam alone or in groups and destroy japanese shipping.

There were two failures of the Japanese attack.

The first was timing. The attack was launched while the three pacific carriers were at sea. This was known by the attackers but thought not important. The result was the development of strategy that favored the carrier over the slower battleship.

The second was ignoring the submarine base. That base was important to all salvage operations immediately following the attack. It was about all we had that wasn’t severely damaged. Also that base was the nerve center that launched pacific submarines throughout the war. That gets us back to this boat. It was the primary boat used during WW2.

This boat could carry the fuel and provisions for roughly 75 day patrols. She could go from surface to fully submerged in 45-50 seconds. The superstructure was free flooding and caused the boat to hang momentarily before submerging. When full of water it would submerge. To shorten that time large limber holes were cut into the superstructure and by the middle of the war the time was reduced to 30-35 seconds. That was truly important because they were not heavily armed for the surface even then. To fully appreciate how fast that was you would have had to be there.

Balao Class Hull

If you think there is little difference between these two boats you are wrong. However, you would be excused because they certainly look the same. Don’t change a winner. The biggest difference between them is the thickness and composition of the pressure hull which added about 100 feet to the operating depth of the boat. The Tench class had very little change as well. Most of the boats of the tench class were cancelled because the war was winding down. The engineering plant had little change between the three classes. So what after all, does that leave us with.

We have a surface ship that can submerge. For simplicity I chose to use the Balao statistics. It is capable of going perhaps 20 knots on the surface. Submerged it could make 8-9 knots. Probably 90% of it’s travels were done on the surface. Even attacks made at night were on the surface. At two knots submerged it could go for 48 hours but without fresh air the crew could make it less than 20. It could travel for 11,000 nautical miles on the surface if you kept the speed to 10 knots. That was the fleet boat. What happened to change it to the submerged high capacity weapons system it is today.

This German type XXI boat was constructed from 1943 to the end of the war. The changes were many but the thing I consider most important is that it was the first boat capable of making more power underwater than on the surface. Obtaining possession allowed us to skip through several evolutions allowing us to reach speeds with diesel electric subs that apparently, are still classified.

If you were expert at aerodynamics (and what gearhead isn’t) you would probably have already noted that the bow of the Gato and Balao are designed like that of a surface craft. That would tend to force the bow up while slowing the boat down. I am sure that none of us think the deck guns or masts resembling an antenna farm add to the submerged speed. Sonar that we took from the Germans allowed us to better operate submerged. The GUPPY conversions were so that the physical plant could better operate in these same depths. GUPPY means Greater Underwater Power Propulsion with the Y to be cute.

Fleet Snorkle submarine

Fleet Snorkel boats. Because we were not yet so adept at spending money we didn’t have, there was a shortfall of funding to modernize the whole fleet under the Guppy program. For those boats that were left out the new sail was installed, covering among other things, a snorkel. As you can see the bow is unchanged from the basic fleet design.

All of these modifications from Guppy 2 to Guppy 3 included snorkel pipework. This system allowed inlet air to be dumped into the submarine atmosphere and exhausted directly from the engine to a diffuser plate a few inches under the surface of the water. Atop the inlet was a snorkel head valve that operated much like the epiglottis at the top of your trachea. It allowed you to move under diesel power, charge batteries and give the crew much needed fresh air. In my opinion it was exceeded in importance in the development of a true submarine only by the nuclear reactor.

The Guppy conversions were in several stages but anyone who claims to be an expert will find himself tripped up. The Guppy 1 would have looked much like this. The bow would be cleaned up. The batteries would have been doubled. One of the four engines was removed in most of the Guppy 2 boats. That obviously reduced power production. The masts would be hidden under this aerodynamic (hydrodynamic really) sail. The Guppy one reportedly did not have a snorkel. All others did. The reduction gears would have been removed and the electric motors attached directly to the shafts to reduce noise. The Bang as pictured here is not a Guppy 1 and probably is a guppy 2.

Using a model allows you to see the sonar chin mount array. This is typical of cold war submarines

Guppy III:Because of the increased battery capacity there was no room left for the crew and equipment. Although not all boats were identical a 15 foot section was added to the hull of the Guppy III. This allowed the boat to retain all four engines and still have a crew. The sail was not a step sail. It was very tall and designed to keep lookouts above the waves. It also provided a lot of adventure when my first capatin ordered a battle surface. The sail was full of water and keeled over until that water drained. That caused a great deal of unanticipated and unappreciated excitement.

The three humps on the deck were a passive ranging device that worked on triangulation much like your visual depth perception. If you had these sonar devices you were assured of spending time at sea. I was a sonar watch stander on my boat and qualified on this gear. I spent a lot of time at sea.

Tang class: This is the boat that was designed to incorporate all the Guppy features when built.The engines were a departure from the past two decades. Instead of a v design or opposing pistons, these were General Motors diesels that were of a pancake design with vertical cranks. The cylinders were radial and the generators were under the engines. The idea was to place four engines in one engine room. The engines leaked. The generators shorted out. The system was a failure.

The design was changed to conventional engines and the boats immediately developed reliability. This class was the last diesel electric design to resemble the WW2 boat.

Admiral Rickover got all the ink. He was insufferable but he deserved a batch of credit. There were people working on a parallel design that deserves more credit for the speed of today’s boats. Rickover’s legacy should be for the endurance of the boat. The David Taylor Model Basin in Carderock, Maryland deserves the credit for how fast they go. For those of you who can appreciate the “used bar of soap” design of the Taurus this will be easy to understand.

One of a kind

I don’t know how fast the Albacore would go. They completed it in 1953. We were told it was in excess of 25 knots. I do know that it was faster than the first nuclear boat, the USS Nautilus. I really don’t want to know how fast it was. As an experiment I don’t think it ever stopped during it’s lifetime. As an operational unit it never existed except for a competition target, however, there were some in the fleet that were very similar.

USS Barbel

This class contained three submarines. It had the last operational diesel in the fleet. They could snorkel very fast. If they needed to dive they could go very fast….. for about half an hour. They were used as a template for the fast attack nuclear submarine that saw through to the end of the cold war.

This is the first nuclear powered sub. If you think it looks much like the postwar Guppy and somewhat like the WW2 Fleet boat we would all agree. However, it was capable of going fast (not as fast I am told as the Albacore or it’s descendants) for much more than a half hour. This boat and the first generation nucs that followed were capable of going under the ice pack and staying there for a while. They generated their own oxygen and scrubbed the CO2 continuously.

Now you may be thinking: Why didn’t those guys just put the stuff from the Nautilus inside the hull of the Albacore. Good idea. Then you are probably wondering – Why not name it after a fish and make a batch of them. Excellent choice.. This picture is of the Scorpion because of personal association. Virtually all submarines manufactured from that time were similar.

BTW… if you noticed the guppy2 in the background, pat yourself on the back. Some of my friends asked me about some of these things after the first article. I don’t think some of them knew I had even been on the boats. I am generally reluctant to write about the boats but finding most of this information online has convinced me I won’t get locked away. I know there is more to say and you can feel free to say it. I hope you enjoyed the story and found it worth the read. I haven’t said this much about the boats since 1969. I am about tapped out.

The Japanese also failed to bomb the oil storage tanks on Pearl. Had they gone ahead with a third bombing mission as originally planned, their main target would have been the oil tanks. I’ve read that that alone, along with a blockade of our oil tankers from Long Beach, would have disabled our Pacific fleet, carriers and all, for a good 6 months.

My dad sailed on Trigger’s maiden voyage with those pancake diesels, Ned Beach commanding. He said their report about the engines was not well received at first.

He later went EDO and worked both at David Taylor and at PNSY. He designed the Dolphin AGSS 555 and was shipbuilding and repair Sup’t at Portsmouth during part of the time it was building there. He was in charge at one point of the Navy’s research effort into Fuel Cells, and he ended his career at NavShips in charge of the ship silencing research division.

I think his favorite words were “I can’t tell you…”

Albacore AGSS 569 holds the submerged speed record published as “in excess of 35 kts.” She’s on display in Portsmouth NH, on the Portsmouth side of the Sarah Mildred Long bridge (Rt 1a). She’s a wonderful boat to visit because other than blanking off the knotmeters she’s entirely open, no barriers to actually touching things. Nautilus is in New London, but they basically built a plastic tunnel on a prescribed route through the boat…

If you do go to visit her, try to slide out of the movie ahead of time. It’s nothing to do with the boat, only the effort to acquire her and get her installed in her present location (my dad sat across the river in Kittery for a year, grinding his teeth and muttering “It’s a boat. Dig a ditch…” while the conserving organization tried to figure out how to get her where they wanted her. They eventually did in fact dig a ditch). It was “coyote boring” when I saw the 25-minute version. I hear they’ve shortened it, but still…
The docents are sailors from various boats at the Yard – they don’t typically know anything about Albacore specifically, but they do know submarines.

@ David B. IMO, the navy and the nation owe your dad and his cohorts just as much respect as they do to Adm. Rickover. They won’t get it but anyone who has looked into sub development knows. The albacore really was special and gave birth to everything current in sub hulls. They are referred to as Albacore hulls.

If your Dad is still around, tell him thanks from one tired old Pharmacist Mate.

He commanded LCSL(3)-82 off Okinawa at the end of the War, straight out of the Naval Academy. He wasn’t even in submarines when Albacore was laid down, and he was on Trigger (I believe) until he went Engineering-Duty-Only in the early ’50s at PNSY. He did two long tours each at Portsmouth and in/near DC. I believe he had a good deal to do with Albacore over time but a lot of that is inference as he never said a word about that sort of thing. When PopSci and similar had big articles about fuel cells around ’62 I mentioned to him and he said “They have a long way to go” and shut up. I only recently discovered that he was the US Navy Boss of Fuel Cells at the time (and not from him…).

He was publicly invisible and never expected or looked for anything else.

Battleships are title B.
That’s Lesson One in strategy.
They are the backbone of the Fleet.
Their fighting power can’t be beat.
They dominate the raging Main
While swinging ’round the anchor chain,
And bravely guard your home and mine
While anchored out there all in line.
They fill the Japs with fear and hate
From well inside the Golden Gate.

Now Lesson Two in strategy–
Our subs and planes are title C.
Just send them out on any mission
And win your battles by attrition.
Where’er you send the subs or planes
They’re bound to chalk up lots of gains–
And losses, too, but what the hell.
Who cares about their personnel?
For planes are chauffeured by young studs;
Lieutenant Commanders run the subs.

That photo of Albacore shows her with her later X-form stern planes. She was a test bed throughout her working life, undergoing a number of major modifications over the years up through the late ’60s. She contributed a great deal to submarine design throughout her life, including the integrated aircraft-type maneuvering system controlled by one man instead of having a man each on bow and stern planes and on the rudder.

Her teardrop hull is known as a body of revolution because you can generate it by for example turning on a lathe. It’s absolute rubbish on the surface, having very little lateral stability, poor buoyancy characteristics and horrendous wave-making resistance. But for a boat that can live underwater it’s superb. In practice almost all Albacore-form boats are built with cylindrical midsections (still bodies of revolution), as it’s not a lot less efficient and a lot cheaper to build.

Side note on buoyancy — submarines in order to be able to submerge are almost sunk even when on the surface. The cylindrical construction of the pressure hull, necessary to provide strength, means that as they sink lower the rate of increase in buoyancy drops off rapidly. Those WWII fleet boats look like surface vessels because they mostly are; but all that ship-shaped superstructure is actually open to the sea and provides no buoyancy.

This makes subs very vulnerable to collisions and to flooding through open hatches. I don’t know if it’s still true, but for many many years there was no nation operating submarines that had not managed to sink at least one alongside a pier. If you drive past the Portsmouth NH you may see submarines tied up alongside. Notice the big red signs fore and aft — if one of those signs gets its bottom edge wet people get very excited.

If you look up the Dolphin (555 boat) that Dad designed, you’ll find that she almost sank off San Diego when they had to open hatches after an electrical fire on board. She was saved, but later decommissioned.

Ive seen a German Uboat close up there is one beside the Hume highway in NSW I was amazed how small it was to house all the equipment. The Aussie navy were still using Uboats untill recently so they must have been a good design but Ive learnt a great deal from your 2 articles Lee keep going with them with all the information out there on the net I doubt what you tell us is classified still.

It has been my impression that the biggest development- at least, with U.S. subs- was the creation of quiet technology, especially propellers… the same technology that was stolen/ sold by a father and son in the Navy, thus allowing the Chinese to “develop” that same technology, at a much cheaper price, than if they had done the research themselves!

Albacore hull and/or Guppy development got them to the fray faster.
Nuclear Power let them stay out longer.
The noise reduction and sonar made them deadly.

My subs had two of the three categories and I spent a lot of time on those special operations that came from those capabilities. I did nothing compared to the guys who spent their career on them. My focus was medicine and my time was servicable. I did nothing heroic but I know a lot of folks who did.

Glad you reran this – missed it the first time. My Dad was a Machinist Mate on the SSR312 Burrfish, a Baleo-class Fleet Boat that had been converted to a Radar Picket submarine in the MIGRAINE I configuration. She was the forth boat to be so converted. He wasn’t real fond of running with the snorkel – apparently when you hit a big wave, a valve would close (to keep water from being ingested), and for that moment, the engines would pull air from inside the hull, rapidly depressurizing the atmosphere!

You are correct Ed. Dipping that head valve would also have the effect of pressurizing the sinuses relative to the atmosphere of the boat. That gave you bunches to swallow and when combined with the salt air reduced a bunch of the shore based allergy symptoms the crew had. Also, it showed the reason to not take a nap on top of the plastic flash covers as it took a couple ear drums.

I loved the snorkel. The air was one of my big concerns and it became fresh and trouble free unless you had a direct tailwind. In that case I did not like the boat full of exhaust till you changed course.

Superb article – while the B-29s and atomic weapons get most of the credit for ending the war, the submarine interdiction of shipping around Japan cut the island off from all its resources – and certainly deserves more recognition.

For those of you that have visited Pearl Harbor you no doubt stopped by to tour the Balao class USS Bowfin.

@ Nate: Your uncle is not the only person who had difficulty smelling after a tour on the boats. May just be coincidental but I also have a lot of difficulty there. From what I can tell, the diesel that permeates everything on the boats probably also can be reliably connected to the Parkinson’s Disease that became clinical about 3-4 years ago.

@Lokki: Thanks for your comment but the aforementioned Parkinson”s means that I probably won’t be doing anything more for a heavily traveled site such as CC. I read this now and it is as though someone else wrote it. I probably will stick to lurking in the comments section. I don’t get nearly so involved in discussions anymore but make comments just so I can follow the thread.

@ chris: I am familiar with the O boats. Went through sub school with two Canadian sailors who were equivalent to the Hospital Corpsman that I was. One is also memorable to me for driving a Pontiac that was nothing but a BelAir under the skin. First time I had ever noted that even though I lived in Newfoundland for a year. Later my sub operated with the O boats from a couple different Navies (actually Can./UK/and Aus) and as a Sonar watchstander I can tell you that they were quiet.

@ T. Turtle: You have no idea. Our fellow sailors thought we were nuts and we enjoyed that.

Thanks for the comments guys. I really enjoyed it when this article surfaced (see what I did there) again. Thanks Paul. I also enjoy hanging out with you on CC.

I’m sorry to hear you have that damned parkinson’s ! a buddy of mine who’s young (early 50’s) and is a Machinist has it too and it’ll curtail his career as well as his life dammit .

I *do* hope you plod along and try to bang out more thoughts and hopefully an article .

Uncle Bill was (IIRC) in the North Atlantic , after his health issues he was transferred to the newly opened Pacific Theater where his lack of smell meant he spent the rest of the war bagging bodies all over the Pacific Rim…..

Grim duty to say the least .

I have never gotten over that smell and am glad I no longer deal with death cars .